Top 5 iPhone and iPad Apps of the Week

Our dedicated readers may have noticed that we dropped out of the loop there for a while, taking care of extensive holiday business. However, now that Santa’s Workshop has quieted down a bit, we’re back and stronger than ever! Starting with:

This app is, no joke, just about the coolest thing we have ever seen in the App Store: But then again, we always did have a soft spot for languages. How many times have you been traveling in a foreign country, only to find yourself befuddled by some public sign in a foreign tongue? Hey, Englishmen: How many times have the Welsh gotten one on you with their cheeky, local signage? With Word Lens, real-life translations are dirt-easy.

Just point your iPhone at any object you’d like translated, and away the app goes. In seconds, and with no Internet connection required, it projects a translated version of the text directly onto the snapped image. This is no Google Goggles derivative, but a fully fleshed-out, entirely original concept that will knock your socks off. If you’re a world traveler, or just a curious purchaser, get the app now!

Don’t feel like taking a trip out to the Home Counties this weekend to have a look at Stonehenge? With Stonehenge Experience, your laze is not a problem! The app is an all-immersive, unbelievably rich guide to the historical landmark for both the iPhone and the iPad. Best of all, the three dollar price-tag is simply one of the lowest we’ve ever seen for this flavor of educational utility.

All in all, the app is an immense repository of information about Stonehenge, as well as several interactive areas designed to allow you an hands-on moment with the relic. You can use the app as an augmented reality engine to have a look at Stonehengeas if it were right there beside you. Or, you can dig up archeological sites from your iPhone. It’s a golden experience, and one we can’t recommend enough for the price.

Before anyone skins our hide about this, yes we know KAYAK isn’t new in the App Store. That being said, we feel it’s particularly worth mentioning during this time of the year. If you’re looking to fly out tonight or tomorrow to experience the New Year in some other part of the country, there’s really no better way to plan your voyage than with this free, and incredibly easy to use application for the iPhone and iPad.

KAYAK is your all-in-one repository for everything traveling related. Need to find a flight and an hotel? The app can do that. What about tracking your flight or changing your reservation? Again, the app has that covered. It’s quick, painless, and gorgeous (especially on the iPad). All in all, a superb bargain for the post-Holiday season.

We’re suckers for applications that allow us to express our artsy side on the iPhone and iPad. With that in mind, Poly—a one dollar gem—is our new favorite toy. The app makes it simple to create tessellated and geometric patterns out of our choice pics. It’s a unique way to create expressionist and abstract pieces from elements of your daily life, and at the very least, it makes us feel like a better artist than we really are.

Poly’s interface draws a lot from Adobe Ideas, which isn’t a bad thing: The simplistic menus and easy-to-navigate controls make it one of the smoothest drawing experiences on the iPad that we’ve ever seen. It’s a bargain at a dollar, and the ideal application for anyone with an artistic side and an iPad laying about the house.

Last, though hardly least, we have Skitch, the long-awaited Evernote addition to the iPad App Store. The app allows users to draw, scribble, annotate, and otherwise mark just about any media that’s available on the device. Want to add a note to a picture? Load the image in Skitch, and the simplistic drawing controls have you covered. How about adding personalized notes to a map for a friend? Again, that’s no problem at all. The functionality just about never-ends, making the app the ideal meeting mate, or personalized annotator.

Best of all, the app is fully synced with Evernote, allowing you to immediately save your creations to the cloud for user later. And as a free offering in the App Store, we can’t speak highly enough of Skitch.